Excerpt: 'The Diet Code' by Stephen Lanzalotta

April 3, 2006

Page 2 of 9

In this imagined scene, one of the world's great geniuses finishes a
meal as ideally proportioned as any of his master works. What
Leonardo da Vinci brought a tavolo (to the table) was as balanced as
anything he consciously designed during his long career -- a career in
which he devoted much energy to exploring and exploiting an
ancient mathematical formula that's come to be known as the
Golden Ratio. Leonardo's application of the Golden Ratio was
arguably quite calculated when it came to his art, but it was likely
intuitive when it came to his meal planning. Leonardo simply chose
from the variety of fresh whole foods available to him, nourishing his
body and mind with ease in a way we seem to have entirely abandoned
today. The effect of proper proportions is just as powerful on
the plate and in the body, however, as it is on a canvas. Leonardo
dined on the particular ancient triumvirate of bread, wine and N
cheese, which makes up the trinity of essential macronutrients --
carbohydrate, protein and fat.

Leonardo, for one, reaped the benefits. He was slender throughout
his long life and famously strong. (He was said to be capable of
bending horseshoes with a single hand or stopping a horse running
past him at full gallop with his bare hands.) That's not to mention cultivating
perhaps the most amazing brain ever -- one of the keenest,
most synthetic and far-reaching intellects of all time!

While I can't guarantee that eating the same way will turn you
into a great painter, inventor, architect, engineer, botanist, anatomist,
astronomer or sculptor, I can promise that consciously re-creating the
quality, combinations and proportion of foods Leonardo relied on
will help you become lean and strong. Put these new proportions
inside your body, and you'll soon see new proportions outside. All
you have to do is crack "The Diet Code" -- master the simple formula
that unlocks the secret to easy weight loss: maximizing nutrition and
metabolism.

As a self-taught baker raised on my grandmother's rustic Italian
cooking, I've thrived on meals much like those on which Leonardo
must have supped. I make breads hardly different from those he
would have known, using the exact same technology as bakers in
Leonardo's time did. More directly, I've admired Leonardo's polymath
mind and strived for decades to take what insights I could from
him and apply them across multiple aspects of my life. Again and
again, I've circled back to that one formula, famously encoded in the
angles of his spread-eagle Vitruvian Man, among many of his other
works, not to mention a litany of designs dating back to the earliest
human civilizations: the Golden Ratio.

The Golden Ratio guided Leonardo in designing the famous fresco
(The Last Supper) that I imagine him contemplating in the opening of
this chapter and has been given credit for the enthralling effect of his Mona Lisa. He used it in his more practical undertakings, too, proportioning
garden schematics, city planning layouts, everyday engineering
plans and the like. In doing so, he was rediscovering wisdom from
ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, which had at that
point been all but lost; among Leonardo's many extraordinary achievements
count rescuing and revitalizing this vital knowledge.